That very same afternoon, wandering about the station, I chanced to saunter into the ticket-office. The clerk's a man with a very well-regulated mind. He gives me chocolate. Just then, however, he was out, but his three-year-old boy-puppy was there sitting on a table all covered with bits of cardboard and little piles of pennies, ordinary brown ones, big white ones and a few little yellow ones. Well, in less time than it takes to cock your ears, that baby was shovelling pennies through the slit in my box and chuckling with joy. I stood it as long as I could, and then, in the nick of time, snatched a big white penny out of his paw and bolted off to the confectioner's. Imagine my astonishment when the girl actually refused to serve me! "Oh, Scottie," she cried, "there must be some mistake; I know your mistress wouldn't give you a two-shilling piece."
I thought Mabel was going to be ill when she felt the weight of my box. She dragged me off that very afternoon to the Committee, and when they discovered I'd collected seven pounds ten in three days the idiotic things they said about me beat anything in my experience since the time I killed the mouse in the conservatory. But I will say Mabel did the right thing by me at the pastry-cook's.
She's going to take me to a Church Bazaar to-morrow. But I doubt if a bazaar can beat that ticket-office.
HERBERT.
"I haven't introduced Herbert to you yet, have I?"
Stella-my-niece spoke with her eyes on the matinée hat before her, and concluded, à propos of the hat, though at first I feared of Herbert—"I do hope and pray that it will come off. Hip! Hip! She's pulling out pins."
"I had no idea there was—a Herbert."
"Oh, Nunckle! and you're responsible for the fact that he's mine at all!"